Stasiland
Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
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Narrated by:
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Denica Fairman
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By:
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Anna Funder
About this listen
East Germany may have been - until now - the most perfected surveillance state of all time.
In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi.
She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.” And she finds spies and Stasi men, in hiding but defiant, still loyal to the regime as they lick their wounds and regroup, hoping for the next revolution.
Stasiland is a brilliant, timeless portrait of a Kafkaesque world, as gripping as any thriller. In a world of total surveillance, its celebration of human conscience and courage is as potent as ever.
©2020 Anna Funder (P)2020 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
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By 1939, Anglo-American journalist John Russell has spent over a decade in Berlin, where his son lives with his mother. He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as World War II approaches, he faces having to leave his son as well as his girlfriend of several years, a beautiful German starlet. When an acquaintance from his old communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets, Russell is reluctant, but he is unable to resist the offer.
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Overall great listen!
- By Patricia on 02-28-24
By: David Downing
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A Spy by Nature
- A Novel
- By: Charles Cumming
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec Milius is young, smart, and ambitious. He also has a talent for deception. He is working in a dead-end job when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, the elite British Secret Intelligence Service, handing him an opportunity to play center stage in a dangerous game of espionage.
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I highly recommend this little gem
- By Chou Young on 02-14-08
By: Charles Cumming
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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Jar City
- By: Arnaldur Indridason
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Gold Dagger Award winner Arnaldur Indridason’s novels featuring Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson became international sensations on their way to selling millions of copies worldwide. The debut of morose detective Sveinsson finds the inspector and his team delving into the murder of a retiree with horrifying secrets.
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Cerebral Police Procedural
- By Aaron on 09-14-13
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The Wind in My Hair
- My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran
- By: Masih Alinejad
- Narrated by: Linda Henning
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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A photo on Masih's Facebook page: a woman standing proudly, face bare, hair blowing in the wind. Her crime: removing her veil, or hijab, which is compulsory for women in Iran. This is the self-portrait that sparked "My Stealthy Freedom", a social media campaign that went viral. But Masih is so much more than the arresting face that sparked a campaign inspiring women to find their voices. She's also a world-class journalist whose personal story, told in her unforgettably bold and spirited voice, is emotional and inspiring.
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An inspiring journey
- By Krishna Teja Rekapalli on 01-06-19
By: Masih Alinejad
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March Violets
- By: Philip Kerr
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer", Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries set in Nazi-era Berlin that are nothing short of spellbinding. The first book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, March Violets introduces listeners to Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin - until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture.
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Brilliant Nazi Era Mystery
- By Constance on 05-04-12
By: Philip Kerr
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Night Soldiers
- By: Alan Furst
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 18 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.
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Best Alan Furst novel!
- By Placeholder on 04-27-11
By: Alan Furst
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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
- A Memoir of Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
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Worth the listen.
- By SEE on 09-06-21
By: Peter Godwin
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Street Without a Name
- Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
- By: Kapka Kassabova
- Narrated by: Emily Gray
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and grew up under the drab, muddy, gray mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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Good start, but ended up not liking the author
- By Giselle on 11-02-21
By: Kapka Kassabova
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Babylon Berlin
- Gereon Rath, Book 1
- By: Volker Kutscher
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Berlin, 1929. Detective Inspector Rath was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he inadvertently killed a man. He has been transferred to the vice squad in Berlin, a job he detests even though he finds a new friend in his boss, Chief Inspector Wolter. There is seething unrest in the city, and the Commissioner of Police has ordered the vice squad to ruthlessly enforce the ban on May Day demonstrations.
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It's no Bernie Gunther Mystery ...
- By Brian English on 01-28-18
By: Volker Kutscher
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Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
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Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
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How to Find Your Way in the Dark
- The Sheldon Horowitz Series, Book 1
- By: Derek B. Miller
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve-year old Sheldon Horowitz is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother only a year ago when a suspicious traffic accident steals the life of his father near their home in rural Massachusetts. It is 1938, and Sheldon, who was in the truck, emerges from the crash an orphan hell-bent on revenge. He takes that fire with him to Hartford, where he embarks on a new life under the roof of his buttoned-up Uncle Nate.
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Absolutely wonderful story.
- By George Thomas on 12-11-21
By: Derek B. Miller
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Intriguingly compelling!
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This book is word redacted CIA review
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At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue. "I’ve always loved Orwell," Funder writes, "his self-deprecating humor, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on." So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.
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East Germany only existed for a short 40 years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that - using persuasion rather than threats - managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi.
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The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.
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In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. Acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to offer a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country.
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Well written and accurate
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From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before.
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Excellent history of the early days of the Cold War
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The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents - Bush and Obama - drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal.
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mix of information and propaganda
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In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.
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The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began. The plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission, should hostilities commence, was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city.
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By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.
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Very Enlightening
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Incarnations
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For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world's largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars, and corporate titans - some famous, some unjustly forgotten - bring feeling, wry humor, and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
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Great listen, the author is biased
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Afgantsy
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The story of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is well known: the expansionist Communists overwhelmed a poor country as a means of reaching a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. It is a great story—but it never happened. In this brilliant, myth-busting account, Rodric Braithwaite, the former British ambassador to Moscow, challenges much of what we know about the Soviets in Afghanistan. He provides an inside look at this little-understood episode, using first-hand accounts and piercing analysis to show the war as it was fought and experienced by the Russians.
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Concise Book of Soviet-Afghan War
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Lotharingia
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Story
Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe. In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany, and the third received the piece in between: Lotharingia.
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The Loquacious Traveler in Middle Earth
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Supreme City
- How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America
- By: Donald L. Miller
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In four words - "the capital of everything" - Duke Ellington captured Manhattan during one of the most exciting and celebrated eras in our history: The Jazz Age. Radio, tabloid newspapers, and movies with sound appeared. The silver screen took over Times Square as Broadway became America's movie mecca. Tremendous new skyscrapers were built in Midtown in one of the greatest building booms in history.
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the background to the NYC we now live in
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By: Donald L. Miller
What listeners say about Stasiland
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- VAC
- 01-12-23
So good
Fascinating. Such great storytelling. Highly recommend! We all know the basics, but this puts such a human face on that period of history.
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- Adam Berger
- 12-04-24
A perfect book
A perfectly non-linear history of life in the GDR under the inescapable gaze of the Stasi. Few peoples have ever been, or ever will be, as obsessively surveilled as East Germans were. What sets this book apart from other histories is Ms. Funder’s novelistic eye for detail and character. Her interviews of civilians and Stasi men alike are sensitively drawn and she is unafraid to complicate easy moral assumptions. I have a low tolerance for historians inserting themselves into their histories, but Ms. Funder does it unobtrusively, in a way that makes it seem like she belongs in the narrative.
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- Sil A.
- 08-11-21
A Great Achievement
This is a well researched and very well written contemporary history book. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder knew she had only a short window before much of East Germany’s history would be forgotten, especially the individual stories. She went to work, spending much time in the former GDR and getting to know many people who lived the Stasi years, either as perpetrators or victims. She took the time not only to research the facts, but to get to know the people. The result is a collection of stories that have heart and are historically important. Listening to this book is getting immersed into a different world, Stasiland. The scenes are very well written making it a pleasure to follow even when the stories are sad. There is much sadness for sure, but also courage, humor and above all, hope. The narration on this audiobook is fantastic. I love the narrator’s accent and performance. What wonderful achievement. Highly recommended.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Victoria Eriksson
- 12-04-21
Amazing
Anna Funder did a beautiful job with Stasiland. Her talent for writing is only matched by her capacity for her empathy, and knowledge of 20th century German history. As I am in grad school studying to work in the foreign policy/int'l relations part of my own govt, I am studying a different language and country than German and Germany, but I am seriously f-ing impressed by her achievements of learning German and going to former East Germany, in order to foster relationships with former East Germans, from former Stasis, Stasi informants, both citizens who succeeded in the repressive system and those who resisted it. It takes much talent and skill to go to a foreign country and persuade lots of different types of people to talk about a dark period of local history. Anna Funder's Stasiland is also newly relevant, given the portion of his career that KGB officer turned dictator of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin spent stationed in Dresden working with the Stasi, and how many of those former Stasis currently are assisting him to influence geopolitics and industry in Europe- Gerhardt Schroeder and Mattias Wernig, for example, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In order to understand the present and build the future, we must understand the past. Anna Funder's Stasiland is an enormous contribution to better understanding that past. I highly recommend, whether to apply what you learn to the current world as I've just described, or for entertainment, it's a gripping book right from the first chapter. Tales of totalitarianism are so important.
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2 people found this helpful
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- AWright
- 09-27-23
Strong reminder of police state bleakness
Overall solid. Especially interesting were the first person accounts of both victims and former Stasi, very nuanced and insightful. A bit too much extraneous pondering by the author, but not enough to diminish the worth of the book.
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- Christopher Hayler
- 11-07-24
amazing story
great narrator, amazing terrible stories, glad someone has taken the time to write the stories of these people's lives
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- Trace
- 11-30-24
Moving account from the heart
A worthwhile and hard read/listen because the vignettes are told so caringly, and it is hard to imagine how humanity's inner life survives in such an concrete-hard word. At times moving and inspiring, others frustrating. Well
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- Randall J Nett
- 12-07-24
Educational, emotional, useful
Remarkably well-told story of East Germany. Such a useful historical account of the brutal Stasi.
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- Citydog
- 02-08-23
Stick with the paper/Kindle versions.
This is a fantastic look at the role of the Stasi in individuals' lives in the DDR. Read it.
Yes, read it, don't listen to it. The narrator is fine when just reading straight English, but when struggling with German words--even common, "easy" words--or trying to do "characters" she is appallingly bad. I don't understand why the publishers would hire someone who can neither pronounce nor stick to any sort of consistent style for pronunciation of German words or names. She is inconsistent with either Anglicizing the pronunciation or very awkwardly attempting it in German. The character voices she attempts are all essentially the same, artificially lowered, almost mockingly dopey voice. The narrator was distracting from the content, and this book deserved much better.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Ellen Kempler
- 04-02-24
Shocking True Tales of Thought Policing
In depth, highly personal stories of the damaging and enduring effects of fascism on German society. Poetically written and empathetically told.
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